"For God and country" - Religion and the endorsement of national self-stereotypes

To assess the relationship between personal religious motivation and sponta neous thoughts about one's nation, Canadian and American undergraduates com pleted a measure of religious orientation, and both listed and rated the im portance of self-generated thoughts about their respective countries. Among Americans, intrinsic orientation predicted greater ascribed importance to the national heritage (e.g., freedom, equal opportunity, tradition, and fam ily) and to official national symbols such as the flag. Among Canadians, in trinsic orientation predicted greater ascribed importance to multiculturali sm but was unrelated to the enshrining of national symbols. Thus, in both c ases, intrinsic religion was associated with the endorsement of ideological components of the nation's dominant self-stereotype.